Partial Cartons and Pallets

You can use partial cartons when you are not using standard pack rounding for demand scheduling. Cartons may contain smaller cartons or items, but you cannot mix items in the same immediate carton unless you are using mixed sequence standard packs.

The system considers pallets as any packaging that is in addition to the innermost carton. If you create carton detail using carton recommendations, you can set the Allow Partial Pallets for Carton Detail processing option on the Process tab to prohibit the creation of partial pallets. If you do not allow partial pallets, the system does not create a pallet if there are not enough cartons to make a full pallet. In this case, the system creates cartons as loose pieces on the shipment. The pieces can be put on a pallet later during staging using the Carton Reorganization application. This option is useful when loose pieces are built onto a mixed pallet. However, this option should not be used with mixed sequence pallets.

These scenarios are examples of partial pallet processing when you do not allow partial pallets:

• If there are ten cartons per pallet but only five cartons are being shipped, the system uses carton detail to create five loose cartons, and the pallet would not be written to carton detail.

• If there are two boxes per carton and ten cartons per pallet, but only nineteen boxes are being shipped, the system creates nine cartons with two boxes per carton, for a total of eighteen boxes and one loose box. The system does not write the pallet to carton detail because there are not enough cartons to make a full pallet. A carton was not created to hold the loose box because it would have been a partial carton.